If you're new to Outlook 365 or just need a quick guide on how to access your email, this post will walk you through three ways to reach your inbox—whether you're using the web version, installing Outlook on your computer, or setting it up on your mobile device.

Method 1: Access Outlook from the Outlook 365 Welcome Screen

Step 1: Navigate to the App Menu

When you first sign in to Outlook 365, you’ll be on the welcome screen. To access your email, locate the grid of squares in the top-left corner of the screen. This is your app launcher.

Step 2: Open More Apps

Click on the grid icon, and a menu will appear with several apps. If you don’t see Outlook right away, scroll down and click on **"More Apps"** to reveal additional options.

Step 3: Select Outlook

From the list of apps, click the Outlook* icon. This will open the Outlook application and take you directly to your email inbox. Now you’re ready to read, compose, and organize your messages.

Method 2: Install Outlook on Your Computer

If you prefer accessing your email directly from your computer, you can install Outlook as part of the Microsoft 365 suite. Here’s how:

Step 1: Open the Installation Menu

From the Outlook 365 home screen, look toward the upper right-hand corner for the Install and more button.

Step 2: Choose Microsoft 365 Apps

On the drop down, choose "Install Microsoft 365 Apps" to access the suite of apps included in your license.

Step 3: Install Office

Under the section labeled Apps and Devices, click "Install Office" This will download an installable file or a `.exe` to your computer.

Step 4: Run the Installer

Once the download is complete, locate the file in your downloads folder and double-click to run it. Follow the on-screen instructions to install Outlook and other Microsoft Office products on your device.

Once installed, you can access Outlook directly from your desktop for an easier way to stay connected to your email.

Method 3: Install Outlook on Your Mobile Device

Prefer to check your email on the go? You can easily install the mobile version of Outlook through the Microsoft 365 mobile app. Here’s how:

Step 1: Open the Installation Menu

As with the previous method, start by clicking the Install and more button in the upper-right corner of the Outlook 365 home screen. 

Step 2: Select Microsoft 365 Mobile App

In the dropdown menu, you’ll see an option to "Install Microsoft 365 Mobile App". Click this option to proceed.

Step 3: Scan the QR Code

A new page will appear with a QR code. Open the camera app on your phone and scan the QR code displayed on your screen. This will direct you to the app store for your device, where you can download the Microsoft 365 mobile app.

Step 4: Install the App

Once redirected, install the app and log in with your Microsoft 365 credentials. You’ll now have access to Outlook and all your Office apps directly on your mobile device.

Now you know three ways to access your Outlook email—via the Outlook 365 web app, installing Outlook on your computer, or setting it up on your mobile device. Whether you’re at home or on the go, you’ll always be connected to your inbox!

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When using Microsoft Outlook, you might notice that meeting requests and notifications are automatically deleted from your inbox once you've responded to them. This is the default setting, and while it helps keep your inbox clean, it can also lead to the loss of important information. If you prefer to keep these meeting requests for reference, you can easily disable this automatic deletion feature.

Steps to Disable Automatic Deletion of Meeting Requests

Follow these simple steps to turn off the automatic deletion of meeting requests in Outlook:

1. Open Outlook and click on the File tab.
2. Select Options from the menu.
3. In the Outlook Options window, click on the Mail tab.
4. Scroll down to the Send messages section.
5. Deselect the checkbox labeled "Delete meeting requests and notifications from Inbox after responding."
6. Click OK to save your changes.

What Happens Next?

With this setting disabled, any meeting requests or notifications you accept will remain in your inbox instead of being automatically moved to the Deleted Items folder. This allows you to keep track of all your meeting-related communications and have easy access to them when needed.

Final Thoughts

Customizing Outlook to fit your workflow can greatly enhance your productivity. By disabling the automatic deletion of meeting requests, you ensure that all important communications are easily accessible and not accidentally lost. If you ever need to revert to the default setting, simply follow the steps above and re-enable the checkbox.

This small adjustment can make a big difference in how you manage your meetings and notifications in Outlook, giving you more control over your inbox.

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When it comes to managing your email settings in Outlook, particularly regarding the automatic download of pictures in emails, it's essential to proceed with caution. Changing these settings can expose you to potential risks, including malware, viruses, and an increase in targeted junk emails. Here's a guide on how to adjust these settings safely and why the default settings are there to protect you.

Why You Should Be Cautious

Spammers often use embedded pictures in emails to confirm that your email address is active. When you automatically download these images, you signal to the spammer that your address is valid, leading to more targeted junk emails in your inbox. Additionally, downloading pictures automatically can open the door to malware or viruses that might be embedded within these images.

Recommended Approach

The safest method to manage picture downloads in Outlook is to keep the default settings, which are designed to protect you. These settings block automatic downloads, allowing you to enable pictures on a per-message basis if you trust the sender. 

How to Manually Enable Picture Downloads

If you still decide that you want to change the default settings, here’s how you can do it:

1. Open Outlook.
2. Navigate to File > Options > Trust Center.
3. Click on the Trust Center Settings button.
4. Select Automatic Download** from the left-hand pane.
5. Uncheck the box that says, "Don't download pictures automatically in HTML e-mail messages or RSS items."
6. Click OK to save your changes.

Final Thoughts

While it might be tempting to enable automatic picture downloads for convenience, remember that the default settings are in place for your protection. Always exercise caution when adjusting these settings, and only download pictures from trusted sources. 

By keeping your Outlook settings secure, you can minimize your exposure to potential threats and keep your inbox safer from unwanted spam and malware.

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If you’re working on a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and experiencing issues with searching emails in Outlook, you're not alone. It's a common problem with a few specific causes and solutions. Below, we'll walk through the common symptoms, causes, and actions required to resolve these issues.

Symptom 1: Outlook Cannot Search Emails on VDI

Problem: You’re unable to search through emails in Outlook while on a VDI session.

Cause: Outlook is attempting to index files in order to search them, but the indexing process never completes. This is a common issue on VDIs due to the nature of their storage and session management.

Action Required:

Disable Cached Exchange Mode:

 Cached Exchange Mode is not supported on standard or dynamic VDI sessions because it requires writing and storing the cached data locally, which isn't preserved from session to session. Typically, VDI sessions are set to run in online mode to avoid this issue.

   

   Here’s how to disable Cached Exchange Mode:

1.    Open Outlook and click the File tab at the top.
2.    Select Account Settings and click on Account Settings from the dropdown.
3.    Under the E-mail tab, double-click the user’s email address.
4.    Uncheck the option Use Cached Exchange Mode under the Server settings.
5.    Click Next and then Finish.
6.    Restart Outlook.
7.    Verify that the search functionality is now working as expected.

   Note: This process might take longer than anticipated to apply.

Symptom 2: Windows Search Engine Disabled Warning

Problem: When you click into the Search bar, you receive a message saying, “The Windows Search Engine is currently disabled. Outlook will not be able to provide fast search results using the Instant Search functionality unless this service is running.”

Cause: The Windows Search function has been disabled on standard VDI sessions by the system administrators due to its heavy usage of processor and network bandwidth, which can slow down performance. 

Action Required:

Clear Windows Search Warning:

Simply click OK on the pop-up message. The search might take slightly longer than usual, but it will still work. The message should only appear once per session, but it may reappear in future sessions or after a VDI profile rebuild.

You can also check the box "Do not show this message again", though this may not prevent it from reappearing after a session reset.

Symptom 3: Search Words Are Not Highlighted

Problem: When searching emails, the search terms are not highlighted within the email content.

Cause: Highlighting search words requires indexing, which is disabled on standard VDI sessions due to the aforementioned resource concerns.

Action Required:

Search Individual Emails:

You can manually search and highlight words within individual emails. Here’s how:

1.    Open the email from the search results.
2.    Click **Find** (or press **F4**) under the **Editing** section on the **Message** menu.
3.    This will allow you to search for the specific word within the email, and it will be highlighted for easier viewing.

Final Note:

As of March 11, 2015, Windows Search has been re-enabled for all pooled VDI sessions, which should resolve some of the search-related issues. However, symptoms 2 and 3 still apply if the search service is disabled.

By following these steps, you should be able to troubleshoot and resolve most search-related issues within Outlook on a VDI session. If problems persist, it might be necessary to consult with your IT department for further assistance.

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My company's Chef Automate workflow pipelines were designed as a part of a middleware infrastructure project. The project required three auto scaled instances each sitting behind their own AWS ELB. The project enlisted the services of five teams, each with their own specialization for the project. The Infrastructure team created AWS Cloudformation Templates (CFTs), CFT cookbooks, VPCs, security groups and ELBs. The middleware team created the cookbooks for the respective instances including the underlying base cookbooks which will be utilized by or company for future projects. The QA team created and iterated upon smoke and functional testing for single instances and their communication between other instances. Finally, the Security team determined the compliance testing necessary for instances' and helped create proper security testing which would stop pipelines should servers fall out of compliance.

When designing the infrastructure and procedures for my company's Chef Automate workflow pipelines we came across a number of hurdles.

First, when provisioning instances via our CFT cookbook, the nodes are bootstrapped with chef client with a user data script. After chef client is installed, via the script, the nodes will run their first-boot.json. This contains the name of the cookbook for the the current project pipeline. If the recipe fails, however, during the initial bootstrapping process the node will not be attached appropriately to chef server.

This bootstrapping process is a necessary component for AutoScaled instances. If new instances are booted, as a part of an AutoScale procedure, those nodes will require a bootstrap procedure be run with the latest cookbooks. Therefore, testing of the cookbook will need to be independent of the CFT deployment steps.

In order to bypass this issue my company developed a pipeline that calls on, not only, our internal CFT provisioning cookbook but also test kitchen for our acceptance nodes.

By using kitchen-ec2 we are able to converge and destroy our cookbooks in acceptance to verify their viability before passing them to our user data script. This is made easier with the inclusion of the delivery-sugar cookbook. Delivery-sugar contains resources that allow for the creation, convergence and destruction of EC2, Azure, Docker and Vsphere instances using the delivery_test_kitchen resource.

My company is currently calling on kitchen-ec2 for instance creation. EC2 currently requires ALL of the following components to run successfully.

Test Kitchen Setup (Acceptance Stage Provisioning):

In order to enable this functionality please perform the following prerequisite steps.

Add ALL of the following items to the appropriate data bag within your Chef Server 

You can convert the private key content to a JSON-compatible string with the following command. 

chef exec ruby -e 'p ARGF.read' automate_kitchen.pem >> automate_kitchen.json 

Since the private key should be secured this data bag should be encrypted. In order to add an encrypted databag to the chef server you must first have proper access to the chef server, which is necessary for a knife command to be run. After this permission is in place you must run the following command.

knife data bag create delivery-secrets -- --secret-file encrypted_data_bag_secret

Where  is the name of your enterprise,  is the name of your organization and  is the current name of the pipeline you are creating. 

In order to decrypt this data the encrypted_data_bag_secret file, used to encrypt the data bag, must be added to your Chef Build servers at the following location.

/etc/chef/

Once these components are deployed Customize your kitchen YAML file with all the required information needed by the kitchen-ec2 driver driver.

NOTE  This kitchen.yml file will be the one found in your .delivery/build_cookbook and not the one found under your project cookbook

Delivery-sugar will expose the following ENV variables for use by kitchen.

• KITCHEN_INSTANCE_NAME - set to the - values provided by delivery-cli 
• KITCHEN_EC2_SSH_KEY_PATH - path to the SSH private key created from the delivery-secrets data bag created from the step above. 

These variable may be used in your kitchen YAML like the following example:



Once the prerequisites are in place you can use delivery_test_kitchen within your .delivery/build_cookbook/provision.rb to deploy instances through test kitchen.




Trigger a kitchen converge and destroy action using Ec2 driver and pointing it to .kitchen.ec2.yml in delivery.

NOTE: When adding a repo_path my companychooses #{workflow_workspace_repo}/.delivery/build_cookbook/. This is by preference and the location of the .yml file can sit wherever the user requires.



Trigger a kitchen create passing extra options for debugging 



Trigger a kitchen create extending the timeout to 20 minutes.

 

Since we are only using kitchen in our acceptance node my company must add the following logic to verify test kitchen is not used outside of the acceptance stage. (workflow_stage is a resource provided by delivery-sugar)

Version Pinning

The second issue we were presented with in creating our workflow pipelines came in the pinning of our environments. 

If using base cookbooks for multiple projects, pinning should not be done on the base cookbook itself. Since cookbooks are pinned at an environment level if the base cookbook is pinned at the environment and then updated, that base cookbook update will in effect alter all projects using it in that environment (acceptance, union, rehearsal delivered. To prevent this pinning from taking place, through workflow, under

.delivery/build-cookbook/provision.rb 

comment out

delivery-truck::provision

In turn if we version pin only the role cookbook at the environment level, being project specific, any changes made to the role cookbook should not have an effect on any other project.

This does mean that in order for a base cookbook to be updated in a project its version must be changed in the role cookbook. So for every underlying cookbook change the role cookbook will need to be version bumped. This is a much more manual process, but it will provide protection from projects breaking with a change to one base cookbook.

This also has the added benefit of version controlling any version bumps we have in our environments for a given projects node. Since the only version pins in an environment fall on the role cookbook, all other changes to versions should be controlled through the role cookbooks metadata and delivery cli commands. These commits can be tied back to individual users and version changes which will better stabilize the environments.

The leading measure in Workflow, if base cookbooks are not project specific, should sit with role cookbooks. These cookbooks should be used to provision servers, and version pin underlying cookbooks, when going through the Union, Rehearsal and Delivered stages of the Chef Automate Workflow to separate project version pinning. 

Setting up Metadata.rb, Provision.rb, Kitchen.yml and Berksfile in .delivery/build_cookbook

NOTE: before adding the workflow provisioning steps to the build_cookbook please add the project cookbook to the chef server, Either through automate workflow or through a knife command. If the project cookbook is not available upon the first run of the pipeline it will fail when trying to download cookbooks

With these two problems resolved, and explained, it is now time to setup the rest of our workflow pipeline.

We will start by modifying our Berksfile within .delivery/build_cookbook/. Since we will be calling on cookbooks that are currently stored in the chef server we will need to make sure that the workflow pipeline can reach out to it to find cookbooks. We do this by adding the chef server source

Next, we will modify our metadata.rb file. We need to make sure we are calling in delivery-sugar, delivery-truck, the current project cookbook for the pipeline and the cookbook we are using to provision our servers. 

NOTE: We only need to call the provisioning cookbook here if this is the role cookbook

We will also configure our kitchen.yml (which we have named here as kitchen.ec2.yml) as we described in the steps above. This file is used for our kitchen converge and destroy in our acceptance provisioning stage. 

NOTE: do not forget to change the cookbook we are calling in the kitchen.yml to reflect the current cookbook we are sitting in. (See run_list) 

Finally, we will modify our provision.rb file. Depending on our environment (role cookbook vs base cookbook or wrapper cookbook. Please see the documentation for version pinning for further explanation).

In a ROLE cookbook We will call upon the provisioning cookbook if we are in the union, rehearsal or delivered stage. This check can be made using the delivery-sugar resource workflow_stage which will call the current stage the pipeline is currently running in.

We will also call on the delivery-truck::provision cookbook to pin our environment. 

NOTE: the delivery-truck::provision recipe is included AFTER the run of our provisioning cookbook, See the section on versioning for more information)

If we are NOT IN A ROLE COOKBOOK delivery-truck::provision will not be called. We will also not need to include the recipe for provisioning in union, rehearsal or delivered. To keep things simple, and to prevent us from having to make too many modifications to our code, we will simply add a warning message in place of the provisioning cookbook includes. 

Once these changes are saved we can version bump our project cookbook, either through the metadata.rb file or the delivery command, and run delivery review.

NOTE: this version bump is done in the PROJECT COOKBOOK not the build cookbook. 

This will push the cookbook into Automate and start the Chef Automate Workflow Pipeline.

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